CentOS - The Community Enterprise Operating System

CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.

CentOS is developed by a small but growing team of core developers. In turn the core developers are supported by an active user community including system administrators, network administrators, enterprise users, managers, core Linux contributors and Linux enthusiasts from around the world.

CentOS has numerous advantages over some of the other clone projects including: an active and growing user community, quickly rebuilt, tested, and QA'ed errata packages, an extensive mirror network, developers who are contactable and responsive, multiple free support avenues including IRC Chat, Mailing Lists, Forums, a dynamic FAQ. Commercial support is offered via a number of vendors.

CentOS 5.6 Released

The CentOS team is pleased to announce the availability of CentOS 5.6. Major changes in CentOS 5.6 compared to CentOS 5.5 include:

ext4 is now a fully supported file system
libvirt was updated to 0.8.2
bind was updated to 9.7 and supports NSEC3 now.
ebtables was added
php53 is available as a php replacement.
System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) has been added.

Other upgrades include newer version of several wireless drivers, Samba3x, ghostscript, LVM, mod_nss, subversion and gcc, plus others.

Links:
Distro Release Announcement |
Documentation: CentOS 5

Release Notes: CentOS
Download: i386 | x86_64